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waloshin

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Oct 9, 2008
3,560
394
Program to automatically create audio tracks from casettes? I thought there was free program that creates tracks from casettes from the silence...
 
Dunno a free solution, only paid ones..

Audio hijack I know has it, but this would depend on how much silence.. Usually with these kinds of detection it would either

- auto detect the minimal silence (which is not good if 1 second silence exsists in a song)
- user controlled so they stick in the seconds eg 2 second gap, then create new track.. (another problem, since u can't always tell how long a pause will be ... CD's are better, but not when you have "2 second gap" on every song

Although i would prefer just recording to one long track, then using Audio editor like Audacity (free) to detect silence afterwards.. Audacity flag silence, so u can visually see the waveform and follow the tags where silence begins..

You can then delete these certain potions as necessary, best way to go.

You could of course just record to audacity, and create new track manually after every song, but u have to be there always.
 
Audio Hijack has presets for Analog and Digital, but you can also do a custom setting. This is from version 2, but 3's settings will be similar.

Screen Shot 2016-09-06 at 9.24.30 AM.png
 
There used to be a free App for this a decade ago. I don't even remember what it was called.
If you can't find a modern version, it's not all that hard to manually find the gaps between tracks using Audacity, and cut/paste into a new window. You can spend the winter with Audacity, manually removing the 10msec pops and clicks from old record->mixtape masterpieces.
Be prepared to splice with cellophane tape. Old cassettes can get brittle or sticky. Bring alcohol and swabs, to clean off your tape heads frequently. You'll probably have to do some re-equalization of the tracks use Audacity as well. The high frequencies, never great on tape anyway, become subdued after repeated plays. Audacity's "Plot Spectrum" capacity offers a decent way to monitor your re-equalization attempts.
 
There used to be a free App for this a decade ago. I don't even remember what it was called.
If you can't find a modern version, it's not all that hard to manually find the gaps between tracks using Audacity, and cut/paste into a new window. You can spend the winter with Audacity, manually removing the 10msec pops and clicks from old record->mixtape masterpieces.
Be prepared to splice with cellophane tape. Old cassettes can get brittle or sticky. Bring alcohol and swabs, to clean off your tape heads frequently. You'll probably have to do some re-equalization of the tracks use Audacity as well. The high frequencies, never great on tape anyway, become subdued after repeated plays. Audacity's "Plot Spectrum" capacity offers a decent way to monitor your re-equalization attempts.
Also, if the cassettes you're going to record are "welded" shells, that is the top and bottom of the shell are fused, then lay in a small stock of shells that are held together by screws. This is because when your old tape breaks, you may have to crack open the shell to get to the two sections.

When I had to do that, I simply bought a brand sold in screwed shells, opened them, tossed out the new tape, repaired the old tape and put it in the shell.

And don't worry too much about the splices. They only have to last one pass.
 
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